The most radical thing about Simplifyber’s shoe isn’t that it’s made from plants. It’s that it was never a piece of cloth. The upper debuted at Paris Fashion Week in September 2024, a collaboration with the Danish brand Ganni, and it arrived fully formed from a mold, bypassing the entire textile supply chain of spinning, weaving, cutting, and sewing [simplifyber.com/about, 2026].
Simplifyber, a Raleigh-based startup, has developed a process it calls “additive manufacturing for soft goods.” They start with a cellulose slurry, a liquid derived from wood pulp, recycled paper, or textiles, inject it into a 3D mold, and out comes a finished product: a shoe upper, a handbag panel, or a car interior component [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief]. The material, branded as Fybron, is 100% bio-based and fully biodegradable, and the company claims the associated CO2 emissions are 33 times lower than those of a traditional shoe upper [simplifyber.com, 2026].
A wedge into the supply chain
The company’s wedge is simple, if technically audacious. Traditional apparel manufacturing is a waterfall of waste. Simplifyber’s process consolidates those steps into one. By dyeing the slurry before molding, they also claim to reduce water use and pollution by up to 95% compared to conventional dyeing [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief].
The team and the pulp connection
Simplifyber was founded in 2021 by Maria Intscher-Owrang, the CEO, and Phil Cohen, the COO. Intscher-Owrang is a former luxury designer with over two decades in fashion, a background that informs both the aesthetic demands and the supply-chain frustrations the technology aims to solve [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief]. The $12 million Series A round closed in April 2025 included Suzano, the Brazilian forestry giant and the world’s largest market pulp producer [Global Venturing].
| Round | Amount (M USD) |
|---|---|
| 2022 Seed | 3.5 |
| 2025 Series A | 12.0 |
| Total Disclosed | 16.1 |
The competitive landscape
Simplifyber operates in the emerging field of next-generation, low-impact fibers, but its one-step molding process sets it apart from most peers.
| Company | Material Source | Core Process | Primary Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplifyber | Wood pulp, recycled textiles | 3D molding from cellulose slurry | Finished soft goods |
| Spinnova | Wood pulp, agricultural waste | Mechanical fibrillation into fiber | Fiber for spinning |
| Renewcell | Recycled cotton textiles | Dissolving pulp into Circulose® | Fiber for spinning |
Where the wheels could come off
Any hardware-heavy, materials-science startup faces a steep climb. For Simplifyber, the path to mass production is lined with specific, capital-intensive hurdles:
- Production scaling. The company states a goal of reaching mass production within six years [sdgs.un.org, 2026].
- Cost parity. The technology must achieve its stated aim of cost-competitiveness with polyester to be adopted beyond niche products [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief].
- Industry adoption. Fashion supply chains are notoriously inertial.
The next twelve months
Simplifyber has said it will begin early pilot production later this year [sdgs.un.org, 2026]. The next year will be about moving from the lab and design collaborations into operational pilots. Key milestones to watch will be the announcement of a production partner or facility, the naming of its first major brand customer beyond a design collaboration, and concrete data on production costs and throughput.